Reserve
An outstanding photographic reportage from the twenties and thirties brings back the memory of the ways of living, ceremonies, adorned bodies of an Africa that can be aptly defined as ‘lost’.
Introduction by Pierre Loos, text by Ezio Bassani
An outstanding photographic reportage from the twenties and thirties brings back the memory of the ways of living, ceremonies, adorned bodies of an Africa that can be aptly defined as ‘lost’. These extraordinary, unpublished pictures, taken with great technical skill and with a sense of great dignity of the people portrayed, constitute a monument to the African continent as it was.
Kazimir Ostoja Zagourski (1880-1941) was the first professional photographer to travel throughout the interior of Congo and visit also the neighboring countries, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa. During his long stay in Africa
he took about 800 pictures, 417 of which, divided in two extraordinary series on different tribes, build up to a unique historic and ethnographic survey.
In a sense, Zagourski’s work constitutes the first ‘non-European’ look, devoid of the colonial overtones that characterize much contemporary work. His forays into the depths of the African continent took him into the most remote villages of the Kuba, Mangbetu, Bwaka, Tutsi, Masai,etc., where he took unprecedented pictures of great ethnographic interest.
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